The decision effectively prevents candidates from filing for office and could delay legislative and congressional primaries — now scheduled for March 6 — until May.

Besides granting Abbott's request for an emergency stay, the one-page order told the groups involved in the redistricting fight to prepare for oral arguments before the court Jan. 9.

There is no deadline for a ruling from the court.

“I think it is surprising that they let it go on for so long,” said Michael Li, an elections lawyer who has been keeping close tabs on Texas' redistricting process.

He said simply granting the stay, which suspends enforcement of interim maps drawn by a three-judge panel in San Antonio until the Supreme Court issues a further ruling, offers no hint on how justices are leaning.

Political operatives across the state said the Supreme Court's move effectively freezes the candidate filing period as lawmakers and potential challengers wait to see what the Supreme Court will do and when the primary elections will be.

“When you don't know what district you live in, you can't very well file for office,” said Harold Cook, a longtime Democratic strategist in Texas. “Politicos all over the place are going to be vibrating in place, trying to figure out what this means, when in fact there is no answer to that question until the Supreme Court is good and ready to tell us.”

Abbott acknowledged in a legal filing that granting his request likely would delay primary elections for Congress and the Texas House and Senate until May. He suggested primaries for other contests could be left in March.

“The Texas Attorney General's Office is committed to protecting the integrity of Texas' elections by ensuring they are conducted based on legally constructed redistricting maps,” Abbott said in a statement late Friday.

While the attorney general's office celebrated what several observers called an unexpected win, state Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, one of the major players in the litigation against the state, said he was puzzled by the Supreme Court's stay. “I thought that the San Antonio court judges didn't go far enough,” said Veasey, who has filed to run in the newly drawn minority-dominated 33rd Congressional district in the Fort Worth area.

The three federal judges in San Antoniohad to create interim redistricting plans for the 2012 election because the maps passed by Legislature aren't legally enforceable until a federal court in Washington, D.C., certifies the proposals don't disenfranchise minority voters.

Abbott told the Supreme Court that the San Antonio judges' maps were “judicial activism at its worst,” and argued that the lower court had gone too far with its maps because courts have not explicitly ruled that the state's maps were illegal.

However, lawyers with the U.S. Justice Department wrote in a key filing that they believed the Legislature's congressional and Texas House maps were drawn with the intent to discriminate.

The judicial panels in Washington and San Antonio — both comprised of two Republican appointees and one Democratic appointee — have signaled their discomfort with the Legislature's redistricting plans.

In a pretrial order, the Washington judges said they believed the state used an improper standard to determine whether the Legislature's maps would disenfranchise minority voters.

The San Antonio court made significant changes to the congressional and state House and Senate maps passed by the Legislature, creating more majority-minority districts.

Observers say the altered districts could give Democrats 65-70 seats in the Texas House, up from 49, and as many as four more seats in Congress.